Cam Cole: Super Bowl history filled with brash talk even if access has shrunk while ticket prices have grown

Sunday, February 7, 2016

By Cam Cole, Vancouver Sun

Peyton Manning #18 of the Denver Broncos talks with Marshall Faulk at Super Bowl Opening Night Fueled by Gatorade at SAP Center on February 1, 2016 in San Jose, California.

Photographed by:Ezra Shaw, Getty Images

San Francisco — Accounts of the early Super Bowls occasionally sound like they were taken from hieroglyphics found on the walls of caves.

The first commissioner’s state-of-the-league news conference was held in Pete Rozelle’s hotel room, with a handful of scribes? Sure, sure. And they were chiseling out their yarns on stone tablets, right?

Reporters wandering out to the pool at the New York Jets’ team hotel in Miami to sit down and interview quarterback Joe Namath, reclining on a deck chair a couple days before Super Bowl III? Come on, where was security? What did the other 2,000 accredited writers do?

But that’s how head-scratchingly normal the first championship games of American professional football look from the vantage point of 50 years on.

Tickets cost as little as $6 to get into L.A. Memorial Coliseum for the first one, the Green Bay Packers of the National Football League versus the newly-merged AFL Kansas City Chiefs, and still 30,000 seats went unsold.

The lowest-priced ticket for Sunday’s 50th Super Bowl is $3,000 --- that’s roughly a million Canadian, give or take --- and you have to know somebody who knows somebody to get one, and it’s not even being held in an NFL city unless you consider Santa Clara (“Santa Clare” as Roger Goodell called it Friday) part of San Francisco.

The host city of the first Super Bowl, though the game wasn’t even known by that name at the time, was touted as “the sports capital of the world.”

Friday, at Goodell’s news conference, the NFL commissioner called Los Angeles “the entertainment capital of the world” --- wisely deciding not to press the sports aspect too much, considering it has trundled along quite nicely without an NFL franchise for more than two decades.

But some story lines, happily, remain very much the same.

You could plunk Denver Broncos’ old-school quarterback Peyton Manning down in L.A. 50 years ago, put Bart Starr’s green-and-gold No. 15 on his back --- or Baltimore QB Earl Morrall’s, for that matter --- and the only notable differences would be all of Peyton’s hand-signalling and audibles and instead of “hut-hut-hut” you’d hear “Omaha!” before the snap.

You think Carolina Panthers QB Cam Newton is brash? Five days before Super Bowl III, Namath was attending a Miami Touchdown Club banquet at which someone in the crowd shouted “the Colts are going to kick your ass!”

Namath said into the microphone: “Hey, I got news for you. We’re going to win Sunday, I’ll guarantee you.”

And then he went out and won the game’s MVP award, a thing Newton could very well do Sunday, minus the guarantee but with a lot more dancing.

The first Super Bowl, according to a wonderful retrospective piece by Nathan Fenno in the Los Angeles Times, needed $3,000 worth of spray paint to make the field look green for CBS and NBC cameras. The 50th needed the NFL’s agronomy experts to take over the field at Levi’s Stadium to attempt to make the surface playable, after a litany of problems with the new stadium’s turf.

In 1967, the networks used a total of 11 cameras for the telecast, which was blacked out in a 75-mile radius around L.A. because the NFL couldn’t sell the tickets.

In 2016, there are 70 cameras, including 36 deployed around the stadium’s upper deck to give a 360-degree view of every play and replay. Any view can be frozen and switched to revolve around the play from different angles.

Fans can see much of this live on giant screens inside the stadium. In 1967, (again, courtesy of the Times) Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt complained about the view from the distant, mostly empty $6 seats in the Coliseum endzone, and said fans would be better off watching it from there using a TV.

Reminded of the blackout, he said "Yes, I know about the blackout. But those seats are beyond the 75-mile limit."

The representatives of the once-rival leagues even used different footballs for the game. The Chiefs used the fatter, AFL-standard Spalding J5V, which the CFL also favoured at the time. The NFL ball was the Wilson “Duke” which the CFL later adopted, as well.

Some may question whether the Super Bowl halftime show has evolved or devolved. The first one had jazz trumpeter Al Hirt, the Grambling State Marching Band and (Holy James Bond!) two guys flying around with jetpacks on their backs.

The Grambling State band holds the record for most Super Bowl appearances, but the NFL went through its Up With People period, too, when hordes of cheery, singing Stepford Kids were in vogue, before settling on mostly post-popular music stars --- beginning with Chubby Checker in 1988, a mere 27 years after “Let’s Twist Again” made his name.

There have been exceptions to the past-it rule: New Kids on the Block when they actually were relatively new kids, Michael Jackson before he went completely off the rails, Justin Timberlake (co-starring Janet Jackson’s right breast), Boyz II Men, U2, Black Eyed Peas (albeit five years after they played the Grey Cup, because we’re so cool), Beyonce, Bruno Mars … but more often, the halftime gig at Super Bowl is pretty much like wearing a sandwich board that says: “It’s Over.”

(Sorry about that, Coldplay.)

As matchups go, Manning vs. Newton is most reminiscent of the meeting two years ago of Manning and Seattle’s Russell Wilson, another young gun with the ability to win from the pocket or on the run. And the Seahawks did win, a 43-8 torching of the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.

But really, there has never been anyone quite like the 6-foot-5 Newton, who is three inches taller and 25 pounds heavier than the average Green Bay Packer of Super Bowl I, and with the speed and moves of a very large running back.

On the flip side of the Newton-Namath analogy, perhaps Manning is not unlike the man the Colts had to sit out in Super Bowl III, the beloved but sore-armed Johnny Unitas. Except Peyton is going to play, and try to get by on his wits and experience.

The Colts had moved on with Earl Morrall, whom Namath had ripped to reporters before the game, saying the NFL’s passing leader would have a hard time playing third-string for the Jets.

Lots of Americans would have loved to see the Colts shove those remarks down Broadway Joe’s throat. Like Newton, Namath didn’t care what people thought of his act.

Namath made good on his guarantee. Earl Morrall died in 2014, and this week it was revealed that at the time of his death he had severe CTE, the brain disease that has afflicted so many ex-NFL players, and may lurk in the brains of a lot of active ones.

Which just goes to show: history is a lot more fun when viewed through the haze of time.